Smoking, obesity among risk factors for diabetes in patients with chronic pancreatitis
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
In patients with chronic pancreatitis, disease characteristics and individual risk factors could help clinicians prevent the development of type 2 diabetes, according to a press release from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
“What we're hoping to do with this information is to build prediction models that clinicians can use to manage patients with chronic pancreatitis who don’t yet have diabetes,” Mark Goodarzi MD, PhD, the senior author of the study and the Eris M. Field Chair in Diabetes Research at Cedars-Sinai, said in the release. “We can look at these factors and say, ‘This patient is at high risk of developing diabetes within X number of years,’ allowing us to identify patients we need to follow closely to help prevent diabetes.”
In a study published in Diabetes Care, Cedars-Sinai researchers collected information from 645 patients with chronic pancreatitis enrolled in the Prospective Evaluation of Chronic Pancreatitis for Epidemiologic and Translational Studies (age range, 18 to 75 years; 276 patients had diabetes) to compare individual risk factors for type 2 diabetes following chronic pancreatitis diagnosis.
According to researchers, men were more than twice as likely as women to develop diabetes, overweight/obese patients were 2.76 times as likely as patients with lower bodyweight to develop diabetes, patients who identified as not white were 2.33 to 2.53 times as likely to develop diabetes as patients who identified as white, patients who smoked were 2.08 times as likely as those who did not smoke to develop diabetes and older patients were more likely to develop diabetes than younger patients.
“Known risk factors for type 2 diabetes as well as pancreas-specific features, such as calcium deposits in the pancreas or shrinkage of the pancreas, predicted who developed diabetes among persons with pancreatitis,” Christie Jeon, ScD, the first author of the study and research associate professor in the department of medicine and research scientist at the Samuel Oschin Cancer Institute at Cedars-Sinai, said in the press release.
Researchers said this information could benefit future treatment of diabetes in patients with chronic pancreatitis.
“Models that predict diabetes risk could encourage clinicians to connect patients with weight loss or smoking cessation programs,” Goodarzi said in the press release.
Researchers also said that future research should consider the impact of genetics, insulin and hormone levels on diabetes risk in patients with chronic pancreatitis.
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts